The Bloom of Nihilism
I feel we are floating in nihilism like a fish in water, especially in the West; nonetheless, nihilism is pervasive everywhere. In the East, it is a reaction to the hypocrisy and excessive self-righteousness of believers. And so many believers are slowly slipping into the stream of nihilism by the very fact of disconnection from the divine through zealotry and fractionism, between themselves and other people, the apostasy of difference, and to see difference as apostasy. I call it pseudo-religious nihilism, where one is congealed in one’s identity and sees evil all around oneself.
It might be striking to most of us to see that we are breathing and living nihilism. It has become our floating condition of understanding the world and our interaction with the world. Nihilism by definition is a sense of disconnection from “reality,” to feel existence as cold and indifferent to us, to feel estranged, disenchanted, and abandoned. The usual remedy for oblivion from the pang of nihilism is cynicism and hedonism: let’s enjoy this one life in pleasure, sex, drugs, and ambitions of wealth, fame, and honor. It represents our usual fear of death, a sense of pity for ourselves who had the chance of living a complete life and has to die anyhow, as fundamentally in nihilism we can’t reconcile our life and death condition to our primordial connection to universe.
Our reaction to and cure from this despair usually is an ecstatic laughter, as Nietzsche and Theory of Bloom suggest. We want to be brave to the last moment, to kiss the noose, even if in the depth of our heart we feel a deep deep loss that can’t be solaced by any laughter. I remember a friend of mine who loved life as most of us do, enjoyed every moment of it, and loved drinking and partying in the name of life. He was a happy nihilist who had a kind of faith that this life is meaningless and thus drinking and enjoying it is the best antidote. I went to his death bed and his last gesture was to drop a shot of vodka in his mouth. Nihilism is as old as Omar Khayyam:
As the rising Venus and moon in the skies appear
To the goodness of quality wine, nothing comes near
I am amazed at the vendors of a liquid so dear
Where they’ll buy a better thing, is not clear.
And:
The palace where Arthur sought the Grail
Is the resting home of the weak and frail
And the knight who challenged death on its trail
On the ocean of death forward must sail
Chasing the temporal is to no avail
As soon as you go through death’s dark veil.
So many Iranians and non-Iranians express and assuage their despair by reciting Khayyam:
If my coming were up to me, I’d never be born
And if my going were on my accord, I’d go with scorn
Isn’t it better that in this world, so old and worn
Never to be born, neither stay, nor be away torn?
In this note, I wish to focus on existential nihilism of the West, which mostly emerged from the nineteen century intellectual history, with a detrimental effect for all people on this planet, by creating a wedge between the ethical and the divine or the spiritual.
My Theses:
1) The separation of the ethical from the spiritual or the divine gives rise to nihilism.
2) Excessive use of or reliance on reason in Western Enlightenment created a flawed perception of the individual as the sovereign subject who is self-sufficient unto itself. This circular and enclosed-self gives rise to nihilism.
3) Following Darwin’s The Origin of Species, we formed a kind of absolute belief or faith in the “natural” origin of human beings. This naturalism had a peculiar characteristic. It levelled off human consciousness—having a self with especial existential characteristics-- to physicalism and materialism and then, through atomistic theory and a crude theory of causal explanation, to objects and things. So, we have the emergence of the materialism of 19th and 20th c. which implies determinism and that life is a subclass of dead.
4) Atheistic existential philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and by extension Foucault nullify the self to a chaotic force of negation [Heidegger has nuances that I won't discuss it here]. This is their fundamental anti-essentialist act to turn the self or consciousness into a kind of metastasis, a form of instability that is not identical with itself, a kind of sheer becoming without any core.
5) The common feature of all these variations of nihilism is "aesthetic of existence," that one gives meaning to one’s life, there is no universal meaning.
I would use some passages of Theory of Bloom (of nihilism) as the context to explicate my theses. In The Play of Blooming Nihilism, Brian Schroeder wrote:
“In the 1990s, an anonymous collective of French intellectuals naming themselves “Tiqqun”[1] began writing to address the possibility of rethinking the notion of the communal—a radical communism—in an effort to stand against the onslaught of technologically driven, capitalist economico-politics and its ideology of what constitutes individualism and society. Bloom is a catholicity both secular and spiritual that emerges from and simultaneously deconstructs and moves beyond the institutional Church and State, signaling in its wake the kairotic (supreme moment) watchfulness of the messianic time, that is, the subversion of the contemporary politics of biopower and sovereignty, about which Agamben, following Foucault, has so forcefully written.
Bloom does not simply represent the modern person or society; rather, Bloom is one “who has become so thoroughly conjoined with his [or her] alienation that it would be absurd to try to separate them.”[2] The figure of “complete nihilism,” Bloom’s “lot is to open the way out of nihilism or perish. The ecstatic opening of [the human being], and of Bloom in particular, the I that is an Anyone, the Anyone that is an I, is the very thing against which the fiction of the individual was invented.” Bloom is everywhere and yet is precisely from Bloom that there must be escape. Bloom is the figure who points to the reinvention of what it means to confront the imminence of a potential impending consummate nihilism.”
Nihilism is the striking awareness that the very consciousness that ponders life and death is smeared with emptiness and nothingness. The very medium of self-consciousness is the veil of separation and a desire for immortality, who believes there is no center, meaning, and measure in life. S0, similar to mystical traditions such as Sufism, one has to remove oneself from in-between to become one with the divine. But as nihilist doesn’t believe in any deity, the destruction of the mask just opens the door into nothing. One has to escape from oneself if one wants to get rid of this agonizing inertia of despair. But how can one escape from oneself if nothing reigns everywhere?
Nietzsche feels that this becoming conscious of oneself is at the same time the problem and the solution for overcoming nihilism: “To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth—to do that even the best so far lacked sufficient sense for the truth…. Even laughter may yet have a future…. For the present, the comedy of existence has not yet ‘become conscious’ of itself. For the present we live in the age of tragedy, the age of moralities and religions.” (The Gay Science, §1) (For extensive discussion of Nietzsche’s nihilism read the endnote [3])
The problem of nihilism is the devaluation of all values. Ethical values are devalued in the sense that they are arbitrary, contingent, contextual, and historical. Foucault calls his method of thinking “nominalism” (universal concepts are just names), “historicism” (historical ontology: that, similar to Marx, there is no universal and essential subject or interiority to self but we are determined by exteriority of historical contingent [accidental] events or, for Marx, necessary development of modes of production), and “nihilism” (that there is no universal truth and value; values and the regime of truths are arbitrary discursive practices which create effects of power within the interplay of certain historical episteme)[4]. There is no divine essence to human beings as the guidance and inner light. Inside is empty. Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre, Camus, and Foucault, one way or another, all agree with these anti-essentialist words of Hegel [unlike Hegel though they don’t think that the Absolute historically unfolds within this dialectic of negativity that seeks a positive content for itself]:
The ‘I’ has a content which it differentiates from itself; for it is pure negativity or the dividing of itself, it is consciousness. This content is, in its difference, itself the ‘I,’ for it is the movement of superseding itself, or the same pure negativity that the ‘I’ is. (Phenomenology of Spirit)
Theory of Bloom puts it best:
Ens Realissimum
Looking within himself, The Ptolemaen found only “two phenomena: sociology and emptiness.” We must start from there, not from what we think we are—sociology—but from what we intimately experience as a lack, because this is the thing that’s most real, the ens realissimum. Bloom does not signify that we are somehow weakened subjects compared to the classical subject and his superb conceit; rather, it reveals that at the basis of human existence there is a principle of incompleteness, a radical inadequacy. What we are is precisely this weakness, which can, if it pleases, choose for itself the mask of the subject.
[Pay attention that paradoxically this “choosing for oneself” echoes an exaggeration of the Western Enlightenment autonomous subject, and that reason is sufficient unto itself. While this idea had certain liberating effect –to think for oneself[5] -- Sapere Aude! (dare to know) “Have courage to use your own understanding!”, absurdly it sought to ground (or bring faith in reason by reason) itself. The philosophy of logic (in Anglo-American analytic tradition) and historicism of postmodernism both showed that this “completeness of an essentially incomplete” is an illusion and they couldn’t find a way out of this dilemma. Nonetheless, the nihilism embedded in the faith that natural human beings can ground (understand and constitute) itself by reason alone persists in Marxism and Mill and all atheistic versions of existentialism, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Foucault. All of them try to show that the Will (-to-Power) of autonomous subject can constitute itself, can find meaning and create itself (Sartre and Foucault), but, as Theory of Bloom suggests, the invented self will be another empty subject or mask, as essentially, according to them, consciousness is pure negativity.]
“We are nothing indeed, nothing but the nothingness around which the movement of our ideas, our experiences, our miseries and our sensations revolves. Indeed, we are the empty axis of this unwalled well, an axis that doesn’t exist on its own account, but because every circle has a center. Yet this irremediable deficiency can itself be understood as the ultimate positivity, expressed as follows:
I AM THE INTERMEDIARY BETWEEN
WHAT I AM AND WHAT I’M NOT.
[This is Sartre’s definition of the self (for-itself): the
for-itself is not identical with its past nor its future. It is already no longer what it was, and it is not yet what it will be. Or as Foucault puts it: “the self is a form which is not identical with itself.”]
Bloom is such an intermediary, but a passive intermediary, the witness of his own de-subjectivation, of his interminable becoming-other. He recovers the originary difference, that of knowing we are not what we are, that no predicate can exhaust our potentiality. Incompleteness is the mode of being of everything that remains in contact with this potentiality, the form of existence of everything that’s destined for becoming.
Bloom is masked Nothingness. That is why it would be absurd to celebrate his emergence in history as the advent of a particular human type: the man without qualities is not a certain quality of man, but on the contrary man as man, the final realization of the generic human essence, which is precisely the deprivation of any essence, is pure exposure and pure availability: worm.”
We are all floating in the lukewarm of nihilism, but usually we don’t bring it into our consciousness as it is painful to encounter the meaninglessness of our lives. We usually cover this lack of universal meaning of life, the agony of feeling abandoned and forlorn, with some sense of personal meaning, pleasure, art, family, or task. It is a common current now—following Sartre’s existentialism that in the face of our awareness of death and disenchantment about God and a divine essence to “invent” our own personal meaning. A deep feeling of disconnection gnaws at our bones. We have come atrociously to believe that the universe is indifferent to our existence and life is a chance event and a subclass of dead particles.
“In this empire of ruins in perpetual renovation, there is no refuge to be had anywhere, and we no longer even have the recourse of an interior desertion, within ourselves. We find ourselves handed over, without any say in it, to a boundless finitude, as if exposed over the entire surface of our being. Thus Bloom is that human whom nothing can defend from the world’s triviality. A reasonable mind concluded one day: “Actually, Bloom is alienated man.” Not true: Bloom is the man who has become so thoroughly conjoined with his alienation that it would be absurd to try and separate them.
Empty angels, creatures without a creator, mediums without a message, we walk among the chasms. Our road, which could just as well have ended yesterday, or years ago, does not have its reason in itself, and knows nothing of any necessity apart from that of its contingency. It is a wandering that transports us from the same to the same on the paths of the Identical: wherever we go, we carry inside us the desert whose hermit we are. And if on certain days we can swear that we are “the whole universe,” like Agrippa von Nettesheim, or more ingenuously “all the things, all the men, and all the animals,” like Cravan, it’s because we see in everything only the Nothing that we ourselves so fully are. But that Nothingness is the absolutely real before which all that exists becomes ghostly.
A thing among things, Bloom stands outside of everything in an abandonment identical to the abandonment of his universe. He is alone in every company, and naked in all circumstances. There he remains, in exhausted ignorance of himself [or herself], his [or her] desires, and the world, where, day after day, life says the rosary of his [or her] absence. For him [or her] all of life’s experiences are interchangeable, and undergone according to a kind of existential tourism.”
A few days ago, my Marxist friend’s wife was giving me a ride. They are a happy family with children and everything: good careers, house, cars, joy, a good sense of self and other. I asked her how she felt about her existence here on the earth, whether she felt the universe was indifferent to her and her family’s existence. She reflected for a while and then said: I wonder how I could think otherwise. She was surprised that I asked her this question. “Have you thought ever how you came to this feeling of inconsolable disconnection?” I asked her, “have you ever reflected on your moral compass? Why are you doing what you are doing?” She said she needed to reflect longer about these questions.
When I read Theory of Bloom, it reminded me of the time that I was lost and suffering deeply from nihilism and kind of moaning the pain of disconnection in some pieces that I wrote. For example, this one from 2001, before the event of 2005 that changed my direction altogether and in the course of 10 years I gradually “reconnected” to the ineffable Merciful:
Imagine that you are alone in the middle of a wood. You left ‘home’ to have a walk in the wood for the love of fresh air and ‘nature’. But you lose yourself. You are lost. You are lost from what? You are lost from ‘home’, from direction, from the route, the path, a way to come back to familiarity and ‘security’. Imagine that you just take another path in the middle of snow, tired of stepping on the footprints of others on the snow; you desire to hear the sound of your fresh steps on snows; its ghezsch ghezsch. And you take a long walk and the pleasure of creating a new path for yourself, but suddenly you look backward and see that your footprints are covered with snow and you don’t have any ‘guideline’ to go backward or forward. How will you feel? How will you feel? How will you feel? This is the feeling of life, for the first time, when you are out of the mold and box.
Where are you? Just in the middle of a void within you, one step to death and one step further from the whole social construction. You are free and you are scared. You wish the ‘illusion’, ‘security’, and the whole ‘ambiance’ and ‘scenery’ which have been set for you. The endorsed certainty of the other. But you know that this will, one day, come to you. You will be that lonely figure in front of your death-destiny. You will see that nothing has left to do, no saving and no planning for ‘retirement’. It is just ‘now’ which is on the verge of annihilation. And if anyone asks you how you are doing? You would say that I forgot the meaning of what I used to say the other day. I have forgotten the linear way that I used to be, I have forgotten the letters and the syllables and the spelling and the proposing. I have forgotten the format and the default. I have forgotten the ritual and the hope and the forgetfulness. I have forgotten everything and I don’t know what I used to tell you the other day.
This is also obvious, ‘self-evident’, except for the fact that ‘the self’ is not anymore that evident that we used to think it is. Nevertheless, it is going to turn into steam, and become transparent. It is all gone in the middle of snow and in the middle of wood. It is there, forgotten, and there is no eye to confirm it, except the trees and birds and the transparent air that cannot be brought into words. I am lost. I am lost. And I am free.
There is a power in every living being. Amidst all animals we are decorated with the power of interpretation. Through this power we exert our power and despair and we think it is ‘real’ because we feel it, we feel it, we feel it, in our whole body. Whether it is a cold and dim astrology, or the brute vividness of myths, or the whole set of religions, or it is a social hope . . . We always feel its ‘reality’. Find the hermeneutics of our time. Find the words that are coming to interpret the embodied process of spiral, find the words that will bring us back to life.
Self-love is a political question. And a new faith is emerging and I feel it in my entire body, but, unlike others I will not say it is ‘true’, but that it is simply the hermeneutics of process, of what suddenly occurs to us [as I was a Foucauldian at the time: historicism, nominalism, and nihilism & trying to exit it]. It is a peeled off time. A sense of certainty that goes beyond ‘doubt’ and ‘certainty’. It is a new faith by embracing doubt. Live me. And kneel down at its altar that is the end of killing and the beginning of self-sacrifice.
From Theory of Bloom:
“Who are you really?
We are all floating in the lukewarm of nihilism, but usually we don’t bring it into our consciousness as it is painful to encounter the meaninglessness of our lives. We usually cover this lack of universal meaning of life, the agony of feeling abandoned and forlorn, with some sense of personal meaning, pleasure, art, family, or task. It is a common current now—following Sartre’s existentialism that in the face of our awareness of death and disenchantment about God and a divine essence to “invent” our own personal meaning. A deep feeling of disconnection gnaws at our bones. We have come atrociously to believe that the universe is indifferent to our existence and life is a chance event and a subclass of dead particles.
“In this empire of ruins in perpetual renovation, there is no refuge to be had anywhere, and we no longer even have the recourse of an interior desertion, within ourselves. We find ourselves handed over, without any say in it, to a boundless finitude, as if exposed over the entire surface of our being. Thus Bloom is that human whom nothing can defend from the world’s triviality. A reasonable mind concluded one day: “Actually, Bloom is alienated man.” Not true: Bloom is the man who has become so thoroughly conjoined with his alienation that it would be absurd to try and separate them.
Empty angels, creatures without a creator, mediums without a message, we walk among the chasms. Our road, which could just as well have ended yesterday, or years ago, does not have its reason in itself, and knows nothing of any necessity apart from that of its contingency. It is a wandering that transports us from the same to the same on the paths of the Identical: wherever we go, we carry inside us the desert whose hermit we are. And if on certain days we can swear that we are “the whole universe,” like Agrippa von Nettesheim, or more ingenuously “all the things, all the men, and all the animals,” like Cravan, it’s because we see in everything only the Nothing that we ourselves so fully are. But that Nothingness is the absolutely real before which all that exists becomes ghostly.
A thing among things, Bloom stands outside of everything in an abandonment identical to the abandonment of his universe. He is alone in every company, and naked in all circumstances. There he remains, in exhausted ignorance of himself [or herself], his [or her] desires, and the world, where, day after day, life says the rosary of his [or her] absence. For him [or her] all of life’s experiences are interchangeable, and undergone according to a kind of existential tourism.”
A few days ago, my Marxist friend’s wife was giving me a ride. They are a happy family with children and everything: good careers, house, cars, joy, a good sense of self and other. I asked her how she felt about her existence here on the earth, whether she felt the universe was indifferent to her and her family’s existence. She reflected for a while and then said: I wonder how I could think otherwise. She was surprised that I asked her this question. “Have you thought ever how you came to this feeling of inconsolable disconnection?” I asked her, “have you ever reflected on your moral compass? Why are you doing what you are doing?” She said she needed to reflect longer about these questions.
When I read Theory of Bloom, it reminded me of the time that I was lost and suffering deeply from nihilism and kind of moaning the pain of disconnection in some pieces that I wrote. For example, this one from 2001, before the event of 2005 that changed my direction altogether and in the course of 10 years I gradually “reconnected” to the ineffable Merciful:
Imagine that you are alone in the middle of a wood. You left ‘home’ to have a walk in the wood for the love of fresh air and ‘nature’. But you lose yourself. You are lost. You are lost from what? You are lost from ‘home’, from direction, from the route, the path, a way to come back to familiarity and ‘security’. Imagine that you just take another path in the middle of snow, tired of stepping on the footprints of others on the snow; you desire to hear the sound of your fresh steps on snows; its ghezsch ghezsch. And you take a long walk and the pleasure of creating a new path for yourself, but suddenly you look backward and see that your footprints are covered with snow and you don’t have any ‘guideline’ to go backward or forward. How will you feel? How will you feel? How will you feel? This is the feeling of life, for the first time, when you are out of the mold and box.
Where are you? Just in the middle of a void within you, one step to death and one step further from the whole social construction. You are free and you are scared. You wish the ‘illusion’, ‘security’, and the whole ‘ambiance’ and ‘scenery’ which have been set for you. The endorsed certainty of the other. But you know that this will, one day, come to you. You will be that lonely figure in front of your death-destiny. You will see that nothing has left to do, no saving and no planning for ‘retirement’. It is just ‘now’ which is on the verge of annihilation. And if anyone asks you how you are doing? You would say that I forgot the meaning of what I used to say the other day. I have forgotten the linear way that I used to be, I have forgotten the letters and the syllables and the spelling and the proposing. I have forgotten the format and the default. I have forgotten the ritual and the hope and the forgetfulness. I have forgotten everything and I don’t know what I used to tell you the other day.
This is also obvious, ‘self-evident’, except for the fact that ‘the self’ is not anymore that evident that we used to think it is. Nevertheless, it is going to turn into steam, and become transparent. It is all gone in the middle of snow and in the middle of wood. It is there, forgotten, and there is no eye to confirm it, except the trees and birds and the transparent air that cannot be brought into words. I am lost. I am lost. And I am free.
There is a power in every living being. Amidst all animals we are decorated with the power of interpretation. Through this power we exert our power and despair and we think it is ‘real’ because we feel it, we feel it, we feel it, in our whole body. Whether it is a cold and dim astrology, or the brute vividness of myths, or the whole set of religions, or it is a social hope . . . We always feel its ‘reality’. Find the hermeneutics of our time. Find the words that are coming to interpret the embodied process of spiral, find the words that will bring us back to life.
Self-love is a political question. And a new faith is emerging and I feel it in my entire body, but, unlike others I will not say it is ‘true’, but that it is simply the hermeneutics of process, of what suddenly occurs to us [as I was a Foucauldian at the time: historicism, nominalism, and nihilism & trying to exit it]. It is a peeled off time. A sense of certainty that goes beyond ‘doubt’ and ‘certainty’. It is a new faith by embracing doubt. Live me. And kneel down at its altar that is the end of killing and the beginning of self-sacrifice.
From Theory of Bloom:
“Who are you really?
The lovely snow-covered countryside glides quickly past the window. The distance between V. and R., which was once a week’s affair, will be traversed in a short time. For an hour you’ve been the occupant of an assigned seat in one of the twenty identical cars of this high-speed train, like so many others. The regular, and no doubt optimal, arrangement of the seats replicates itself in the abstract harmony of a toned-down neon. The train follows its rails, and in this coach, so sensibly attuned to the idea of order, it seems that human reality itself follows its invisible rails.
A healthy and polite indifference inhabits the space separating you from the woman in the seat nearby. Neither of you will feel the superfluous need to speak to one another during the trip, let alone to engage in conversation. That would disturb your distraction, and your neighbor’s concentrated study of the women’s press (“How to sleep with a man without his noticing it,” “Soft hitting on guys,” “Is he a good catch?,” “Gifts that make sense,” “Who are you REALLY?,” and so on). Nor, when her cell phone rings, will the young woman find it necessary to stand up:
“Hello?...wait, what do you mean you’re not there?!... you’re making fun of me or what?...listen, that’s three weekends I’ve been stuck with the kids, I work all week and already I have trouble finding the time to live, so no, no and no, I can’t do it… find a way, it’s not my problem…everybody has their life, you’ve already made a mess of mine…how many times do I have to tell you: I’m going away with Jerome this weekend, and that’s that…oh sure, and how would that be? with the little one throwing fits all day long, blubbering “Where’s papa?”… Jesus, because you’re his father! … out of the question… I don’t give a damn, you’re taking care of them this weekend… too bad for her, you should’ve found one that’s more accommodating…I warn you, if nobody shows up I’m leaving them with the concierge…not true, I’m quite reasonable… that’s it, ciao.”
The scene is repeated ad infinitum in all its banality. It’s a new fact of life. It’s shocking at first, like a slap, but we’ve had to spend years preparing for it, scrupulously, by becoming perfect strangers to each other: blank existences, indifferent, flat presences. At the same time, no part of this situation could be taken for granted if we were not absolutely intimate within the estrangement. It was necessary, therefore, that the estrangement also become the index of our relationship with ourselves, that we become in every respect—Blooms. If Bloom is also encountered in books, it’s because each of us has already passed him on the street, and seen him subsequently in ourselves. The latter confirms the former.
One fine day, you pay closer attention than usual to the collective silence of a subway train, and allow yourself to be overcome, beneath the shared pretense of contemporary customs, by a shudder, a primordial dread, open to every suspicion. The last man, the man of the street, of the crowds, of the masses, mass man—that is how THEY portrayed Bloom to us initially: as the sad product of the time of the multitudes, as the disastrous son of the industrial age and the end of every enchantment. But in these designations as well, there is the same shudder—THEY shudder before the infinite mystery of ordinary man. Behind the theater of his qualities, everyone senses a pure potentiality lurking there; a pure potentiality that we’re all expected to ignore. There remains the necessary anxiety that we believe we can alleviate by demanding from one another a strict absence from oneself, a disregard of that common potential that has become unspeakable for being anonymous. Bloom is the name of that particular anonymity.”
Given this upheaval of spiritual ruin, emptiness, and alienation, I noticed something strange happens to the soul of the individual: in the course of time, it gradually transforms and decays to a kind of ethically loose and unstable person, who can’t hold onto a genuine commitment to anything but the principle of an aesthetic or other kinds of pleasure or will to power – under the shadow of a vague humanism. However, one constantly experiences a sense of despair that one tries to drown it in alcohol or drug, career or pleasure, relationship, family, magic and sorcery, something that one hopes to stop or solace him or her from thinking about “why am I here?”. “What is the meaning of my existence?”: this question occurs only to human beings. No action or distraction can overcome the despair of not knowing (feeling the connection) the answer to this question. As Kierkegaard[6] puts it:
“This comes to the fact that despair is a qualification of spirit, that it is related to the eternal in human. But the eternal s/he cannot get rid of, no, not to all eternity; s/he cannot cast it from him or her once for all… The self which s/he despairingly wills to be is a self which s/he is not… what s/he really wills is to tear his or her self away from the [divine] Power which constituted it. But notwithstanding all the efforts of despair, that Power is the stronger, and compels one to be the self s/he does not will to be… This is the situation in despair. And however thoroughly it eludes the attention of the despaired, and however thoroughly the despaired may succeed in losing himself or herself entirely, and losing himself or herself in such a way that it is not noticed in the least—eternity nevertheless will make it manifest that his or her situation was despair , and it will so nail one to oneself that the torment nevertheless remains that one cannot get rid of oneself, and it becomes manifest that one was deluded in thinking that one is succeeded. And thus in one eternity acts, because to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to human, but at the same time it is eternity’s demand upon him or her.”
However, the atheistic faith can’t accept it. God is dead; we are utterly a natural phenomenon made of atoms and dead particle; science had proven it; the universe and reality is indifferent to me. The way I comport myself in the world, my ethos and ethical practices, have nothing to do with the universe. The implosion of hydrogen atoms in stars has no ethics. Thus ethics is disconnected from the universe and from the universal meaning of my existence as a dependent soul/body (as one) originated from the universe. Ironically, we gave ourselves the contingent (accidental) quality of conscious awareness and love--at the disposal of survival of genes-- and deprived our origin, the universe, from even having this simple awareness that we crown ourselves with, turning it into dead particles. For example, in Marxism, consciousness and love are the superstructures based on modes of production of homo economicus; or in evolutionary biology they are mediums of survival of selfish genes. Consequently, we became alien to ourselves and created a breach between the way we conduct ourselves in the world, our ethical practices, and the meaning of our existence in the world, as there is no universal meaning to our being here, life as such is a subclass of dead and ethics now is a pragmatic and practical issue for its consequences.
In Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism, maximizing pleasure for the most as the result of actions or general practices, became the measure of the ethical. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory of ethics, following Darwin’s The Origin of Species and the development of sciences, it hopes to turn moral problems into measurable calculus of the amount of pleasure. Consequently, the notions of efficiency, and cost and benefit analysis, became the hallmark of our ethical discourse.
The other major feature of 19th c. existentialism is Nietzsche who through his genealogy of morality, basically gave rise to moral relativism of our time. He confronted Mill’s utility-pleasure principle with his will-to-power and prioritized the aesthetic of existence to the ethical, and cancelled out the religious by his declaration of the death of God: “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” (The Birth of Tragedy)
Marx as well introduced another hiatus between the ethical and spiritual by calling them the superstructure whose foundation is based on economic modes of production. I hold that Marxism’s secularism is also a variation of nihilism for these reasons: 1) Human beings need a sense of connection or integration in the universe or the divine. 2) Marx’s materialism still implies that life is a subclass of dead. 3) Marx holds the Enlightenment ideal of self-sufficiency of rational human being unto itself. 4) Similar to liberal secularism, not only Marxism separates the ethical from the spiritual, but also it doesn't have any coherent ethical theory. Remember Marxism holds that ethics as well as spirituality is a superstructure based on material condition of life. So, he suggests by changing material conditions of life (relations of production) through political action we can change the whole social moral-spiritual apparatus. I argue that this lack of ethics-connected-to-our-spiritual-needs gives rise to nihilism.
A healthy and polite indifference inhabits the space separating you from the woman in the seat nearby. Neither of you will feel the superfluous need to speak to one another during the trip, let alone to engage in conversation. That would disturb your distraction, and your neighbor’s concentrated study of the women’s press (“How to sleep with a man without his noticing it,” “Soft hitting on guys,” “Is he a good catch?,” “Gifts that make sense,” “Who are you REALLY?,” and so on). Nor, when her cell phone rings, will the young woman find it necessary to stand up:
“Hello?...wait, what do you mean you’re not there?!... you’re making fun of me or what?...listen, that’s three weekends I’ve been stuck with the kids, I work all week and already I have trouble finding the time to live, so no, no and no, I can’t do it… find a way, it’s not my problem…everybody has their life, you’ve already made a mess of mine…how many times do I have to tell you: I’m going away with Jerome this weekend, and that’s that…oh sure, and how would that be? with the little one throwing fits all day long, blubbering “Where’s papa?”… Jesus, because you’re his father! … out of the question… I don’t give a damn, you’re taking care of them this weekend… too bad for her, you should’ve found one that’s more accommodating…I warn you, if nobody shows up I’m leaving them with the concierge…not true, I’m quite reasonable… that’s it, ciao.”
The scene is repeated ad infinitum in all its banality. It’s a new fact of life. It’s shocking at first, like a slap, but we’ve had to spend years preparing for it, scrupulously, by becoming perfect strangers to each other: blank existences, indifferent, flat presences. At the same time, no part of this situation could be taken for granted if we were not absolutely intimate within the estrangement. It was necessary, therefore, that the estrangement also become the index of our relationship with ourselves, that we become in every respect—Blooms. If Bloom is also encountered in books, it’s because each of us has already passed him on the street, and seen him subsequently in ourselves. The latter confirms the former.
One fine day, you pay closer attention than usual to the collective silence of a subway train, and allow yourself to be overcome, beneath the shared pretense of contemporary customs, by a shudder, a primordial dread, open to every suspicion. The last man, the man of the street, of the crowds, of the masses, mass man—that is how THEY portrayed Bloom to us initially: as the sad product of the time of the multitudes, as the disastrous son of the industrial age and the end of every enchantment. But in these designations as well, there is the same shudder—THEY shudder before the infinite mystery of ordinary man. Behind the theater of his qualities, everyone senses a pure potentiality lurking there; a pure potentiality that we’re all expected to ignore. There remains the necessary anxiety that we believe we can alleviate by demanding from one another a strict absence from oneself, a disregard of that common potential that has become unspeakable for being anonymous. Bloom is the name of that particular anonymity.”
A Hiatus Between the Ethical and the Spiritual
Given this upheaval of spiritual ruin, emptiness, and alienation, I noticed something strange happens to the soul of the individual: in the course of time, it gradually transforms and decays to a kind of ethically loose and unstable person, who can’t hold onto a genuine commitment to anything but the principle of an aesthetic or other kinds of pleasure or will to power – under the shadow of a vague humanism. However, one constantly experiences a sense of despair that one tries to drown it in alcohol or drug, career or pleasure, relationship, family, magic and sorcery, something that one hopes to stop or solace him or her from thinking about “why am I here?”. “What is the meaning of my existence?”: this question occurs only to human beings. No action or distraction can overcome the despair of not knowing (feeling the connection) the answer to this question. As Kierkegaard[6] puts it:
“This comes to the fact that despair is a qualification of spirit, that it is related to the eternal in human. But the eternal s/he cannot get rid of, no, not to all eternity; s/he cannot cast it from him or her once for all… The self which s/he despairingly wills to be is a self which s/he is not… what s/he really wills is to tear his or her self away from the [divine] Power which constituted it. But notwithstanding all the efforts of despair, that Power is the stronger, and compels one to be the self s/he does not will to be… This is the situation in despair. And however thoroughly it eludes the attention of the despaired, and however thoroughly the despaired may succeed in losing himself or herself entirely, and losing himself or herself in such a way that it is not noticed in the least—eternity nevertheless will make it manifest that his or her situation was despair , and it will so nail one to oneself that the torment nevertheless remains that one cannot get rid of oneself, and it becomes manifest that one was deluded in thinking that one is succeeded. And thus in one eternity acts, because to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to human, but at the same time it is eternity’s demand upon him or her.”
However, the atheistic faith can’t accept it. God is dead; we are utterly a natural phenomenon made of atoms and dead particle; science had proven it; the universe and reality is indifferent to me. The way I comport myself in the world, my ethos and ethical practices, have nothing to do with the universe. The implosion of hydrogen atoms in stars has no ethics. Thus ethics is disconnected from the universe and from the universal meaning of my existence as a dependent soul/body (as one) originated from the universe. Ironically, we gave ourselves the contingent (accidental) quality of conscious awareness and love--at the disposal of survival of genes-- and deprived our origin, the universe, from even having this simple awareness that we crown ourselves with, turning it into dead particles. For example, in Marxism, consciousness and love are the superstructures based on modes of production of homo economicus; or in evolutionary biology they are mediums of survival of selfish genes. Consequently, we became alien to ourselves and created a breach between the way we conduct ourselves in the world, our ethical practices, and the meaning of our existence in the world, as there is no universal meaning to our being here, life as such is a subclass of dead and ethics now is a pragmatic and practical issue for its consequences.
In Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism, maximizing pleasure for the most as the result of actions or general practices, became the measure of the ethical. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory of ethics, following Darwin’s The Origin of Species and the development of sciences, it hopes to turn moral problems into measurable calculus of the amount of pleasure. Consequently, the notions of efficiency, and cost and benefit analysis, became the hallmark of our ethical discourse.
The other major feature of 19th c. existentialism is Nietzsche who through his genealogy of morality, basically gave rise to moral relativism of our time. He confronted Mill’s utility-pleasure principle with his will-to-power and prioritized the aesthetic of existence to the ethical, and cancelled out the religious by his declaration of the death of God: “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” (The Birth of Tragedy)
Marx as well introduced another hiatus between the ethical and spiritual by calling them the superstructure whose foundation is based on economic modes of production. I hold that Marxism’s secularism is also a variation of nihilism for these reasons: 1) Human beings need a sense of connection or integration in the universe or the divine. 2) Marx’s materialism still implies that life is a subclass of dead. 3) Marx holds the Enlightenment ideal of self-sufficiency of rational human being unto itself. 4) Similar to liberal secularism, not only Marxism separates the ethical from the spiritual, but also it doesn't have any coherent ethical theory. Remember Marxism holds that ethics as well as spirituality is a superstructure based on material condition of life. So, he suggests by changing material conditions of life (relations of production) through political action we can change the whole social moral-spiritual apparatus. I argue that this lack of ethics-connected-to-our-spiritual-needs gives rise to nihilism.
The Way Out of Nihilism
By a thorough reflection, we can understand that our belief system about the universe and ourselves in scientific mode, the very idea that one is absolutely sure that the galaxies that we see in NASA pictures and in astronomy are dead, our reducing ourselves to dead atoms and particles, this article of faith is itself ungrounded as well as the reductive method of evolutionary biology, which in a total term reduces us to our selfish genes. Foucault taught us a precious lesson: critique is to question “truth” (read scientific truth) on its (ethical) effect of “power”, and to question “power” on its discourses of “truth”. Nihilism objectifies our everyday interactions with the world and each other, with animals and plants, and subsequently creates an unsurpassable gap between our ethical behavior and our ontological and spiritual connection with all living beings, the world, universe, and the divine. This is the death of our interconnected-soul/body-to-our-origin from the time we declared the death of God, and this disconnection will kill us physically as well as spiritually.
Historically, surely there are some improvements in our lives. We see a general attempt at the liberation of women and minorities. There is a constant struggle for overcoming discrimination and injustice. But in the general scale of events, we have to exit this predominant nihilism, objectification and mortification of the world and consequently ourselves, if there is any hope that our political actions in the future can save us and other species on this planet. Because the dream that “a secular society would be a more enlightened, peaceful and just society,” in the course of two centuries turned into a nightmare: two world wars, cold wars, mass industrialization and consumerism, colonization and modern slavery, moral decadence, animal factories and destruction of environment, extinction of 20% of species, and the prospect of human made global warming, droughts and floods which are likely to bring about mass extinction. As Foucault once said: “We know what we do, frequently we know why we do what we do, but what we don’t know is ‘what we do’ does.”
I already mentioned the followings in another note and repeat it here. To me, the following is a way out of [self-]destruction of nihilism:
Axial Age sages, Socrates, Euripides, Upanishad’s Mystics, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, and then Jesus, and Mohammad share a non-consequentialist message: they all hold that justice and morality are for harmony with God, Dao, or Heaven (T’ien) and are good for their own sake (have intrinsic value) and subsequently also have extrinsic value (good consequences). In Western Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant comes closest to this non-consequentialist approach. However, he along with other rationalists put all his faith in reason alone, which is the point of excess in our historical pendulum swing and detrimental to the divine balance of our soul.
Kantian Western Enlightenment of the sovereignty of reason has an interesting and strange ethical theory, which is a heroic attempt to show that our wired in and innate (a priori) law of reason defies inconsistency in ethical issues and falls into cognitive dissonance and contradiction if it can’t universalize its own moral actions, i.e., I shouldn’t find myself in cognitive dissonance if everyone does the same thing that I morally do. This Kantian theory can’t explain why this inconsistency should be avoided. Kant appeals to a sense of “reverence” for the law of reason within. We all understand the kind of shame and guilt we feel, when we realize we are inconsistent. Maturity of divine conscience is a movement from the shame we experience under the dictum of social norms only to the shame we experience if we violate our own divine nature and lose the integrity of our own conscience.
Our Divine Essence or Nature
In elaboration of this thesis, I end this note by turning to the views of several of the world religions on human nature. These quotes, from Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, show that justice and morality have intrinsic value and connect us to our source.
Lao Tzu: Taoism Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations… Tao flows through all things, inside and outside, and returns to the origin of all things. … The Tao is great, The Universe is great, Earth is great, Human is great. These are the four great powers…
Hua Hu Ching (Lao Tzu’s oral teachings) In ancient times, people lived holistic lives. They didn’t overemphasize the intellect, but integrated mind, body and spirit in all things. ..... Simply avoid becoming attached to what you see and think. Relinquish the notion that you are separated from the all-knowing mind of the universe. Then you can recover your original pure insight and see through all illusions. Knowing nothing, you will be aware of everything. Remember: because clarity and enlightenment are Within your own nature, they are regained without moving an inch.
Confucius
Confucius remarked: Heaven is author of the virtue that is in me. The power of spiritual forces in the Universe—how active it is everywhere! Invisible to the eyes, and impalpable to the senses, it is inherent in all things, and nothing can escape its operation. What is God-Given (Given by T’ien or “heaven”) is what we call human nature. To fulfill the law of our human nature is what we call the moral law [Tao]. The cultivation of the moral law is what we call culture. Our central self or moral being is the great basis of existence, and harmony or moral order is the universal law in the world. Confucius remarked: “The life of the moral person is an exemplification of the universal moral order…. The life of the vulgar person, on the other hand, is a contradiction of the universal moral order.” Confucius remarked: “To find the central clue to our moral being which unites us to the universal order, that indeed is the highest human attainment…”, Confucius remarked: “There are people who seek for the abstruse and strange and live a singular life in order that they may leave a name to posterity. This is what I never would do. There are again good people who try to live in conformity with the moral law but who, when they have gone half way, throw it up. I never could give it up. Lastly, there are truly moral people who unconsciously live a life in entire harmony with the universal moral order and who live unknown to the world and unnoticed by others without any concern. It is only people of holy, divine natures who are capable of this…” Confucius said: In the morning hear the Way; in the evening die content.
Upanishads
Three thousand years ago, Nachiketas seeks wisdom of life from the King of Death (Yama), narrated in Katha Upanishads. Death says: Take horses and gold and cattle and elephants; choose sons and grandsons that shall live a hundred years. Have vast expanses of land, and live as many years as you desire. Or choose another gift that you think equal to this, and enjoy it with wealth and long life. Be a ruler of this vast earth. I will grant you all your desires. Ask for any wishes in the world of mortals, however hard to obtain. To attend on you I will give you fair maidens with chariots and musical instruments. But ask me not, Nachiketas, the secrets of death. Nachiketas: All these pleasures pass away, O End of all! They weaken the power of life. And indeed how short is all life! Keep thy horses and dancing and singing. Human cannot be satisfied with wealth. Shall we enjoy wealth with you in sight? Shall we live whilst you are in power? I can only ask for boon I have asked. When a mortal here on earth has felt one’s immortality, could he wish for a long life of pleasures, for the lust of deceitful beauty? Solve then the doubt as to the great beyond. Grant me the gift that unveils the mystery. This is the only gift Nachiketas can ask…. Death: There is the path of joy, and there is the path of pleasure. Both attract the soul. Who follows the first comes to good; who follows pleasure reaches not the End… There is the path of wisdom and the path of ignorance. They are far apart and ends to different ends. You are, Nachiketas, a follower of the path of wisdom: many pleasures tempt you not. Abiding in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, fools go aimlessly hither and thither, like blind led by the blind…. Not even through deep knowledge can the Atman [the divine self within] be reached, unless evil ways are abandoned, and there is rest in the senses, concentration in the mind and peace in one’s heart.”
Buddhism: The Fullness of Emptiness by Thich Nhat Hanh
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. We can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “inter-be.” If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. So we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also, so we can say that everything is in here in this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything coexists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is. Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper would be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without non-paper elements, like mind, logger, sunshine, and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.
But the Heart Sutra seems to say the opposite. Avalokiteshvara tells us that things are empty. Let us look more closely. Empty of What? The Bodhisattva Avalokita: while moving in the deep course of Perfect Understanding, shed light on the five skandhas and found them equally empty. According to Avalokiteshvara, this sheet of paper is empty; but according to our analysis, it is full of everything. There seems to be a contradiction between our observation and his. Avalokita found the five skandhas empty. But empty of what? The key word is empty. To be empty is to be empty of something. The five skandhas, which may be translated into English as five heaps, or five aggregates, are the five elements that comprise a human being. These five elements flow like a river in every one of us. In fact, these are really five rivers flowing together in us: the river of form, which means our bodies; the river of feelings; the river of perceptions; the river of mental formations; and the river of consciousness. They are always flowing in us. So according to Avalokita, when he looked deeply into the nature of these five rivers, he suddenly saw that all five are empty. If we ask, “Empty of what?” he has to answer. And this is what he said: “They are empty of a separate self.” That means none of these five rivers can exist by itself alone. Each of the five rivers has to be made by the other four. It has to coexist; it has to inter-be with all the others. When Avalokita says that our sheet of paper is empty, he means it is empty of a separate, independent existence. It cannot just be by itself. It has to inter-be with the sunshine, the cloud, the forest, the logger, the mind, and everything else. It is empty of a separate self. But, empty of a separate self means full of everything. So it seems that our observation and that of Avalokita do not contradict each other after all. Avalokita looked deeply into the five skandhas of form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness, and he discovered that none of them can be by itself alone. Each can only inter-be with all the others. So he tells us that form is empty. Form is empty of a separate self, but it is full of everything in the cosmos. The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. http://www.lionsroar.com/the-fullness-of-emptiness/
Judaism
The word “image” (selem) is sometimes related to a verb ‘salam’ (to “cut off”). However, it is generally considered as “representation”. This conception of “representation” is different from the modern concept of mental images. It means ‘presence’ but not ‘identity’. So we can say in a sense God is present in human being but not identical to it. It is interesting that this way of representing God goes against the tradition of ‘image’ and ‘idolatry’ in which man used to create a statue or the like and called it a representation of God or a symbol of its presence. In both Mesopotamia and Egypt, “[t]he primary purpose of the image . . . was not to describe the god; rather the image was one of the primary places where the god manifested himself” (“The Anchor Bible Dictionary,” Volume III, p.390). In Genesis, on the contrary, God creates man and manifests Himself in his own image. While in Egypt and Mesopotamia sometimes the king also was considered as the manifestation of god, in Genesis human race on the whole is the manifestation of God, though in the beginning deprived of the knowledge of good and bad and desiring the divine wisdom, rooted in being God’s representation. “Thus, the presence of the god and the blessing that accompanied that presence were affected through the image. It was the function of the image rather than its form that constituted its significance” (“The Anchor Bible Dictionary,” Volume III, p.390).
Rambam points out that the Hebrew words translated as "image" and "likeness" in Gen. 1:27 do not refer to the physical form of a thing. The word for "image" in Gen. 1:27 is "tzelem," which refers to the nature or essence of a thing, as in Psalm 73:20, "you will despise their image (tzel'mam)." You despise a person's nature and not a person's physical appearance.
The Dual Nature: In Genesis 2:7, the Bible states that God formed (vayyitzer) man. The spelling of this word is unusual: it uses two consecutive Yods instead of the one you would expect. The rabbis inferred that these Yods stand for the word "yetzer," which means impulse, and the existence of two Yods here indicates that humanity was formed with two impulses: a good impulse (the yetzer tov) and an evil impulse (the yetzer ra). The yetzer tov is the moral conscience, the inner voice that reminds you of God's law when you consider doing something that is forbidden. According to some views, it does not enter a person until his 13th birthday, when he becomes responsible for following the commandments. The yetzer ra is more difficult to define, because there are many different ideas about it. It is not a desire to do evil in the way we normally think of it in Western society: a desire to cause senseless harm. Rather, it is usually conceived as the selfish nature, the desire to satisfy personal needs (food, shelter, sex, etc.) without regard for the moral consequences of fulfilling those desires. The yetzer ra is not a bad thing. It was created by God, and all things created by God are good. The Talmud notes that without the yetzer ra (the desire to satisfy personal needs), man would not build a house, marry a wife, beget children or conduct business affairs. But the yetzer ra can lead to wrongdoing when it is not controlled by the yetzer tov. There is nothing inherently wrong with hunger, but it can lead you to steal food. There is nothing inherently wrong with sexual desire, but it can lead you to commit rape, adultery, incest or other sexual perversion. The yetzer ra is generally seen as something internal to a person, not as an external force acting on a person. The idea that "the devil made me do it" is not in line with the majority of thought in Judaism. Although it has been said that Satan and the yetzer ra are one and the same, this is more often understood as meaning that Satan is merely a personification of our own selfish desires, rather than that our selfish desires are caused by some external force. People have the ability to choose which impulse to follow: the yetzer tov or the yetzer ra. That is the heart of the Jewish understanding of free will. The Talmud notes that all people are descended from Adam, so no one can blame his own wickedness on his ancestry. On the contrary, we all have the ability to make our own choices, and we will all be held responsible for the choices we make. http://www.jewfaq.org/human.htm
Jesus: Christianity
The Parable of the Mustard Seed: The kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard-seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; As a seed, mustard is smaller than any other; but when it has grown it is bigger than any garden-plant; it becomes a tree, big enough for the birds to come and roost among its branches.”
The Parable of the Treasure: The kingdom of Heaven is like treasure lying buried in a field. The man who found it, buried it again; and for sheer joy went and sold everything he had, and bought that field. The Parable of the Vineyard Laborers · The Parable of the Wedding Feast. The Parable of the Prodigal Son. The Parable of the Good Samaritan.
The Kingdom of God Is Among You. Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.
Gospel of Thomas: Jesus said: “if your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.
Islam
We created human. We know the promptings of human soul, and are closer to him [or her] than his [or her] jugular vein. (Quran 50:16) God is the First and the Last, the Ascendant and the Intimate, and of all things Knowing. God knows what penetrates into the earth and what emerges from it and what descends from the heaven and what ascends therein; and God is with you wherever you are. (57:3-4)
When your Lord took out the offspring from the loins of the Children of Adam and made them bear witness about themselves, He said, ‘Am I not your Lord? And they replied, ‘Yes, we bear witness.’ So you cannot say on the Day of Resurrection, ‘We were not aware of this,’ (7:172)
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these. (17: 36)
Those who, having done something shameful or having wronged their own souls, remember God and immediately ask forgiveness for their sins... (Quran 3:135)
Have they not thought about their own selves within themselves? God did not create the heavens and earth and everything between them without a serious purpose and an appointed time, yet many people deny that they will meet their Lord. (30:8)
So [prophet] as a man of pure faith, stand firm and true in your devotion to the religion. This is the natural disposition God instilled in mankind—there is no altering God’s creation—and this is the right religion, though most people do not realize it. (30:30)
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[1] This name is taken from the Hebrew phrase tiqqun olam, meaning the reparation, restitution, and redemption of the world.
[2] Tiqqun, Theory of Bloom, trans. Robert Hurley (LBC Books, 2012), 20. This text and others by Tiqqun can be found here.
[3] In the following, summarily I explained the problem of nihilism (using Nietzsche) under six steps:
Ø Step One: We are excessive beings who oscillate constantly between extremes until we historically come to our senses through Golden Mean and Golden Rule. We want to execute cruelly the “other” aspect of our nature. We can’t easily get attuned to the so called duality of our nature (earth and sky, animal and human, dust and spirit, Jung’s mana attributes) and can’t dove step out of first, the beast, to the other, the divine human (not man or woman separated). Once the Axial Age message moved us out of beast-like stage, we turned the whole angelic message to compulsion and coercion and rather than lovingly embrace the flawed and the falling (as Jesus did) we raised a system of exclusion and torture for those who represented the “negative” and the animalistic in us, hence we fell into monstrosity in the name of fighting monstrosity.
Ø Step Two: The historical pendulum went in excess to the other extreme, hence Western Enlightenment, the reign of “reason” got precedence in our understanding of ourselves. Cartesian “thinking thing” as the foundation of our metaphysical and epistemological certainty became the highest value by the utter exclusion of divine nature within us: now “I”, the self, reason, the thinking subject became God.
Ø Step Three: But reason failed to give us “meaning of life” and “ethical/spiritual compass” and a complete consistent system whose foundations could be justified by reason itself. We attempted to create equality, democracy, social justice, and morality by reason alone. But in our excessive historical oscillation, we created as well the reign of terror (guillotine), Panopticon[1], bureaucracy, world wars, concentration camps, unbridled capitalism, colonialization, modern slavery, wage slavery, and plutocracy.
Ø Step Four: The pendulum moved to the other extreme, God was dethroned (Nietzsche’s God is Dead), as well reason was dethroned, the emergence of moral relativism, hedonism, humanism, and Babylonian sensuality, continued subjugation of women as “sensual beings,” and sensuality as the only meaning remained for us (the dawn of 20th c. Lawrence, Wolff, Russell, impressionism, etc). The struggle for freedom of women and fight against racism, sexism, and for the poor were also in close sway against the background of hedonism and suppression of the deprived and the poor, the colonized and the black, and due to the inherent nihilistic failure of “reason”, we also raised a system of horrors of measurelessness and pleasure seeking souls in the name of progress. While we tried to heal our historical wounds: slavery, subjugation of women, and class conflict, we did it in the ambiance of nihilism, where the ideas of “unity”, “truth”, “goal” and “meaning” lost their essential meaning, they became “names”; we had already become “nominalists”.
Nietzsche writes:
Ø Step Two: The historical pendulum went in excess to the other extreme, hence Western Enlightenment, the reign of “reason” got precedence in our understanding of ourselves. Cartesian “thinking thing” as the foundation of our metaphysical and epistemological certainty became the highest value by the utter exclusion of divine nature within us: now “I”, the self, reason, the thinking subject became God.
Ø Step Three: But reason failed to give us “meaning of life” and “ethical/spiritual compass” and a complete consistent system whose foundations could be justified by reason itself. We attempted to create equality, democracy, social justice, and morality by reason alone. But in our excessive historical oscillation, we created as well the reign of terror (guillotine), Panopticon[1], bureaucracy, world wars, concentration camps, unbridled capitalism, colonialization, modern slavery, wage slavery, and plutocracy.
Ø Step Four: The pendulum moved to the other extreme, God was dethroned (Nietzsche’s God is Dead), as well reason was dethroned, the emergence of moral relativism, hedonism, humanism, and Babylonian sensuality, continued subjugation of women as “sensual beings,” and sensuality as the only meaning remained for us (the dawn of 20th c. Lawrence, Wolff, Russell, impressionism, etc). The struggle for freedom of women and fight against racism, sexism, and for the poor were also in close sway against the background of hedonism and suppression of the deprived and the poor, the colonized and the black, and due to the inherent nihilistic failure of “reason”, we also raised a system of horrors of measurelessness and pleasure seeking souls in the name of progress. While we tried to heal our historical wounds: slavery, subjugation of women, and class conflict, we did it in the ambiance of nihilism, where the ideas of “unity”, “truth”, “goal” and “meaning” lost their essential meaning, they became “names”; we had already become “nominalists”.
Nietzsche writes:
"Having reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities—but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it. What has happened, at bottom?
The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of “aim,” the concept of “unity,” or the concept of “truth.” Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking [. . .]. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories “aim,” “unity,” “being” which we used to project some value into the world—we pull out again; so the world looks valueless." (Will to Power)
Not strange when I ask my students how many of you believe there is an over-arching objective meaning to our lives, no hands are raised, yes no hands. Enjoying oneself and having a career, houses and cars, subjectivism and pleasure (sensuality), and if the pursuit of sciences and arts are meant, they are antidotes to a meaningless pathological life, in which survival and pleasure are the only moving engines.
Again Nietzsche says:
Not strange when I ask my students how many of you believe there is an over-arching objective meaning to our lives, no hands are raised, yes no hands. Enjoying oneself and having a career, houses and cars, subjectivism and pleasure (sensuality), and if the pursuit of sciences and arts are meant, they are antidotes to a meaningless pathological life, in which survival and pleasure are the only moving engines.
Again Nietzsche says:
"The ways of self-narcotization.— Deep down: not knowing whither. Emptiness. Attempt to get over it by intoxication: intoxication as music [. . .]; intoxication as blind enthusiasm for single human beings or ages [. . .].— Attempt to work blindly as an instrument of science: opening one’s eyes to many small enjoyments; e.g. also in the quest of knowledge [. . .]; art “for its own sake” (le fait) and “pure knowledge” as narcotic states of disgust with oneself; some kind or other of continual work, or of some stupid little fanaticism [. . .]." (Will to Power)
Ø Step Five: Now the pendulum has come to its full force of excess in Nihilism, it has to take the very value seeking soul, the very God, the very principle of perfection of the soul and attempt for betterment, all the religions and the very Golden Rule responsible for Nihilism. Krzysztof Michalski interprets Nietzsche in this way:
"Nietzsche demonstrates, theoretically we can also call the process that has led us to this situation “nihilism.” For the world appears to be without value precisely because the values we have invested in the world are failing: they no longer perform their ordering or organizing function. The project (investment) of these very values—the ultimate goal, the all- encompassing totality, truth in itself—is therefore the beginning of nihilism. The sickness whose culmination is the critical situation in which we find ourselves today derives from the attempt to order the world in which we live according to these values. We cannot therefore liberate ourselves from this nihilism if we resume living in accordance with them and seeing the world through their prism. On the contrary, doing so sets us on a path that leads necessarily to nihilism, in the aforementioned sense of historical crisis. Nihilism is a pathology not of outlooks or attitudes but of their historical motivations, a pathology of life—but the attempt to reorganize life according to the patterns from which we have departed when we fell into the crisis of nihilism does not lead to our liberation from it. On the contrary, the values whose abandonment the word “nihilism” signifies cannot save us from it because they are in fact its root cause." (The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's Thought)
Ø Step Six: In this step, we evaluate the content and method of our historical investigation. The solution to this crisis accordingly is the re-evaluation of all values so that to overcome nihilism. But this overcoming turns out to be an impossible task. Because the historicism invented and invested is itself self-defeating, contradictory, and devouring itself from the ground up, like a negative ouroboros.
Ø Here we have historical absolutism and fanaticism which in the name of a comprehensive totality of the full excess of “perspectivism,” “moral relativism,” “historical ontology or materialism,” “sociology of knowledge,” and “standpoint epistemology” rejects the ahistorical ethics/spirituality of religions, which used to call for justice, harmony, peace of heart, love, and achieving union with God or Dao or Spirit. Why? Because all these wonderful values turned into their opposites through the inferno of excess of righteousness and zealous gazes that perceived evil all around itself.
Michalski clarifies: At any rate, in Nietzsche’s opinion, a logic independent of historical experience is a complete fantasy. We can therefore understand history and its logic, the historicity of history, only by referring to history itself. The “ahistorical” perspective, the point of view “from beyond” history that would aid us in this understanding, is nonsense. There is no such thing. “History,” in this context, is yet another name for the world in which we live: the world of becoming, the world of constant change and irreducible diversity. Attempts at discovering a goal, a totality, a “truth” beyond it, attempts at discovering the “transcendent meaning” of the world in which we live, or else at understanding in reference to some “external” system of reference—all these end, as we have already seen, in utter failure. Every- thing we know is comprehensible only in the context of our irreducibly diverse, infinitely mutable lives.
So, according to Nietzsche: Life as we live it is the only possible measure of value. It is our life that creates the order that organizes its diverse and ever-changing forms, but it cannot be appraised in itself: its value is the same in each individual moment, and the sum of values produced by it always remains the same. This is the core of nihilism, the answer to the question of what’s wrong with the values that give birth to nihilism: it is their claim to assess, to evaluate, the world as such, life as such. (Michalski)
Pay attention to the point of excess as if there is no ahistorical measure of life and evolution of soul because the so called patriarchal God and scriptures are dead. Accordingly, we can invent ourselves anew, but as there is no “universal measure and standard”—universality itself is rejected as patriarchy. This is my point: we have constantly thrown the baby with the bath water out. Hence:
Ø Step Seven: The birth of historicism, Marxism, postmodernism, and some variations of feminist nihilism in reaction to historical subjugation of women, are indeed the historical reaction of pendulum in melting the ahistorical truth as such, and to dissolve the divine side of human nature in favor of the animal part, so the emergence of naturalism, physicalism, materialism, and Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault’s aesthetic (taste and sensual) creation of the self.
[4] Foucault: “What meaning is this enterprise [replacing the history of knowledge with the historical analysis of forms of veridiction or regimes of truths] to be given? There are above all its immediately apparent ‘negative’, negativistic aspects. A historicizing negativism, since it involves replacing a theory of knowledge, power, or the subject [the self] with the analysis of historically deterministic practices. A nominalist negativism, since it involves replacing universals like madness, crime, and sexuality with the analysis of experiences which constitute singular historical forms. A negativism with a nihilistic tendency, if by this we understand a form of reflection which, instead of indexing practices to systems of values which allow them to be assessed, inserts these systems of values in the interplay of arbitrary but intelligible practices.” (The Government of Self and Others)
[5] In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant defines Western Enlightenment as “man’s way out of his self-incurred tutelage (Minorite, immaturity). Tutelage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere Aude! (dare to know) “Have courage to use your own understanding!”
[6] In existential tradition, Kierkegaard introduced the ethical as a phase of the three modes of being: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious: (From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
“Kierkegaard presents his pseudonymous authorship as a dialectical progression of existential stages. The first is the aesthetic, which gives way to the ethical, which gives way to the religious. The aesthetic stage of existence is characterized by the following: immersion in sensuous experience; valorization of possibility over actuality; egotism; fragmentation of the subject of experience; nihilistic wielding of irony and skepticism; and flight from boredom.
The figure of the aesthete in Either-Or (Part One) is an ironic portrayal of German romanticism, but it also draws on medieval characters as diverse as Don Juan, Ahasverus (the wandering Jew), and Faust. It finds its most sophisticated form in the author of “The Seducer's Diary”, the final section of Either-Or (Part One). Johannes the seducer is a reflective aesthete, who gains sensuous delight not so much from the act of seduction but from engineering the possibility of seduction. His real aim is the manipulation of people and situations in ways which generate interesting reflections in his own voyeuristic mind. The aesthetic perspective transforms quotidian dullness into a richly poetic world by whatever means it can.”
It is ironic that the aesthetic mode of existence somehow became the dominant feature of 19th to 21st century nihilism. For example, in Nietzsche, Sartre, or Foucault, we see the same characteristics of Kierkegaard’s description of nihilistic aesthetic of existence.
The second stage is the ethical, which for Kierkegaard is still separate from the religious or spiritual:
“Ethics is used to denote both: (i) a limited existential sphere, or stage, which is superseded by the higher stage of the religious life; and (ii) an aspect of life which is retained even within the religious life. In the first sense “ethics” is synonymous with the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit, or customary mores. In this sense “ethics” represents “the universal”, or more accurately the prevailing social norms. The social norms are seen to be the highest court of appeal for judging human affairs—nothing outranks them for this sort of ethicist. Even human sacrifice is justified in terms of how it serves the community, so that when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia he is regarded as a tragic hero since the sacrifice is required for the success of the Greek expedition to Troy (Fear and Trembling).”
Ø Step Five: Now the pendulum has come to its full force of excess in Nihilism, it has to take the very value seeking soul, the very God, the very principle of perfection of the soul and attempt for betterment, all the religions and the very Golden Rule responsible for Nihilism. Krzysztof Michalski interprets Nietzsche in this way:
"Nietzsche demonstrates, theoretically we can also call the process that has led us to this situation “nihilism.” For the world appears to be without value precisely because the values we have invested in the world are failing: they no longer perform their ordering or organizing function. The project (investment) of these very values—the ultimate goal, the all- encompassing totality, truth in itself—is therefore the beginning of nihilism. The sickness whose culmination is the critical situation in which we find ourselves today derives from the attempt to order the world in which we live according to these values. We cannot therefore liberate ourselves from this nihilism if we resume living in accordance with them and seeing the world through their prism. On the contrary, doing so sets us on a path that leads necessarily to nihilism, in the aforementioned sense of historical crisis. Nihilism is a pathology not of outlooks or attitudes but of their historical motivations, a pathology of life—but the attempt to reorganize life according to the patterns from which we have departed when we fell into the crisis of nihilism does not lead to our liberation from it. On the contrary, the values whose abandonment the word “nihilism” signifies cannot save us from it because they are in fact its root cause." (The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's Thought)
Ø Step Six: In this step, we evaluate the content and method of our historical investigation. The solution to this crisis accordingly is the re-evaluation of all values so that to overcome nihilism. But this overcoming turns out to be an impossible task. Because the historicism invented and invested is itself self-defeating, contradictory, and devouring itself from the ground up, like a negative ouroboros.
Ø Here we have historical absolutism and fanaticism which in the name of a comprehensive totality of the full excess of “perspectivism,” “moral relativism,” “historical ontology or materialism,” “sociology of knowledge,” and “standpoint epistemology” rejects the ahistorical ethics/spirituality of religions, which used to call for justice, harmony, peace of heart, love, and achieving union with God or Dao or Spirit. Why? Because all these wonderful values turned into their opposites through the inferno of excess of righteousness and zealous gazes that perceived evil all around itself.
Michalski clarifies: At any rate, in Nietzsche’s opinion, a logic independent of historical experience is a complete fantasy. We can therefore understand history and its logic, the historicity of history, only by referring to history itself. The “ahistorical” perspective, the point of view “from beyond” history that would aid us in this understanding, is nonsense. There is no such thing. “History,” in this context, is yet another name for the world in which we live: the world of becoming, the world of constant change and irreducible diversity. Attempts at discovering a goal, a totality, a “truth” beyond it, attempts at discovering the “transcendent meaning” of the world in which we live, or else at understanding in reference to some “external” system of reference—all these end, as we have already seen, in utter failure. Every- thing we know is comprehensible only in the context of our irreducibly diverse, infinitely mutable lives.
So, according to Nietzsche: Life as we live it is the only possible measure of value. It is our life that creates the order that organizes its diverse and ever-changing forms, but it cannot be appraised in itself: its value is the same in each individual moment, and the sum of values produced by it always remains the same. This is the core of nihilism, the answer to the question of what’s wrong with the values that give birth to nihilism: it is their claim to assess, to evaluate, the world as such, life as such. (Michalski)
Pay attention to the point of excess as if there is no ahistorical measure of life and evolution of soul because the so called patriarchal God and scriptures are dead. Accordingly, we can invent ourselves anew, but as there is no “universal measure and standard”—universality itself is rejected as patriarchy. This is my point: we have constantly thrown the baby with the bath water out. Hence:
Ø Step Seven: The birth of historicism, Marxism, postmodernism, and some variations of feminist nihilism in reaction to historical subjugation of women, are indeed the historical reaction of pendulum in melting the ahistorical truth as such, and to dissolve the divine side of human nature in favor of the animal part, so the emergence of naturalism, physicalism, materialism, and Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault’s aesthetic (taste and sensual) creation of the self.
[4] Foucault: “What meaning is this enterprise [replacing the history of knowledge with the historical analysis of forms of veridiction or regimes of truths] to be given? There are above all its immediately apparent ‘negative’, negativistic aspects. A historicizing negativism, since it involves replacing a theory of knowledge, power, or the subject [the self] with the analysis of historically deterministic practices. A nominalist negativism, since it involves replacing universals like madness, crime, and sexuality with the analysis of experiences which constitute singular historical forms. A negativism with a nihilistic tendency, if by this we understand a form of reflection which, instead of indexing practices to systems of values which allow them to be assessed, inserts these systems of values in the interplay of arbitrary but intelligible practices.” (The Government of Self and Others)
[5] In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant defines Western Enlightenment as “man’s way out of his self-incurred tutelage (Minorite, immaturity). Tutelage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere Aude! (dare to know) “Have courage to use your own understanding!”
[6] In existential tradition, Kierkegaard introduced the ethical as a phase of the three modes of being: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious: (From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
“Kierkegaard presents his pseudonymous authorship as a dialectical progression of existential stages. The first is the aesthetic, which gives way to the ethical, which gives way to the religious. The aesthetic stage of existence is characterized by the following: immersion in sensuous experience; valorization of possibility over actuality; egotism; fragmentation of the subject of experience; nihilistic wielding of irony and skepticism; and flight from boredom.
The figure of the aesthete in Either-Or (Part One) is an ironic portrayal of German romanticism, but it also draws on medieval characters as diverse as Don Juan, Ahasverus (the wandering Jew), and Faust. It finds its most sophisticated form in the author of “The Seducer's Diary”, the final section of Either-Or (Part One). Johannes the seducer is a reflective aesthete, who gains sensuous delight not so much from the act of seduction but from engineering the possibility of seduction. His real aim is the manipulation of people and situations in ways which generate interesting reflections in his own voyeuristic mind. The aesthetic perspective transforms quotidian dullness into a richly poetic world by whatever means it can.”
It is ironic that the aesthetic mode of existence somehow became the dominant feature of 19th to 21st century nihilism. For example, in Nietzsche, Sartre, or Foucault, we see the same characteristics of Kierkegaard’s description of nihilistic aesthetic of existence.
The second stage is the ethical, which for Kierkegaard is still separate from the religious or spiritual:
“Ethics is used to denote both: (i) a limited existential sphere, or stage, which is superseded by the higher stage of the religious life; and (ii) an aspect of life which is retained even within the religious life. In the first sense “ethics” is synonymous with the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit, or customary mores. In this sense “ethics” represents “the universal”, or more accurately the prevailing social norms. The social norms are seen to be the highest court of appeal for judging human affairs—nothing outranks them for this sort of ethicist. Even human sacrifice is justified in terms of how it serves the community, so that when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia he is regarded as a tragic hero since the sacrifice is required for the success of the Greek expedition to Troy (Fear and Trembling).”
Seeing the ethical as mores or social norms also makes it utterly a matter of generic universality that we inherit from our parents and culture. This sense of the ethical still is somehow tainted with conformity and doesn’t represent an authentic choice. The measure of the meta-ethical good and evil, for Kierkegaard, is God:
“For Kierkegaard Christian faith is not a matter of regurgitating church dogma. It is a matter of individual subjective passion, which cannot be mediated by the clergy or by human artefacts. Faith is the most important task to be achieved by a human being, because only on the basis of faith does an individual have a chance to become a true self. This self is the life-work which God judges for eternity.
The individual is thereby subject to an enormous burden of responsibility, for upon h/er existential choices hangs h/er eternal salvation or damnation. Anxiety or dread (Angest) is the presentiment of this terrible responsibility when the individual stands at the threshold of momentous existential choice. Anxiety is a two-sided emotion: on one side is the dread burden of choosing for eternity; on the other side is the exhilaration of freedom in choosing oneself. Choice occurs in the instant (Øjeblikket), which is the point at which time and eternity intersect—for the individual creates through temporal choice a self which will be judged for eternity. But the choice of faith is not made once and for all. It is essential that faith be constantly renewed by means of repeated avowals of faith. One's very selfhood depends upon this repetition, for according to Anti-Climacus, the self “is a relation which relates itself to itself” (The Sickness Unto Death). But unless this self acknowledges a “power which constituted it,” it falls into a despair which undoes its selfhood. Therefore, in order to maintain itself as a relation which relates itself to itself, the self must constantly renew its faith in “the power which posited it.” There is no mediation between the individual self and God by priest or by logical system (contra Catholicism and Hegelianism respectively). There is only the individual's own repetition of faith. This repetition of faith is the way the self relates itself to itself and to the power which constituted it, i.e. the repetition of faith is the self.”
The agony and angst of having and holding faith and renew it in each day and each decision and act of holding faith, accordingly, requires to surrender to the paradox and absurd, such as the Abrahamic teleological suspension of the ethical in following the dream that God asked him to sacrifice his own son. The dread and absurdity (as it goes against the universality of the ethical) is what makes faith a problematic which can’t be categorized within a grid of intelligibility:
“Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which are offensive to reason. The central paradox is the assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human being (Jesus). There are two possible attitudes we can adopt to this assertion, viz. we can have faith, or we can take offense. What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose faith, we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact, we must believe by virtue of the absurd.
Much of Kierkegaard's authorship explores the notion of the absurd: Job gets everything back again by virtue of the absurd (Repetition); Abraham gets a reprieve from having to sacrifice Isaac, by virtue of the absurd (Fear and Trembling); Kierkegaard hoped to get Regine back again after breaking off their engagement, by virtue of the absurd (Journals); Climacus hopes to deceive readers into the truth of Christianity by virtue of an absurd representation of Christianity's ineffability; the Christian God is represented as absolutely transcendent of human categories yet is absurdly presented as a personal God with the human capacities to love, judge, forgive, teach, etc. Kierkegaard's notion of the absurd subsequently became an important category for twentieth century existentialists, though usually devoid of its religious associations.”
We see that the ethical for Kierkegaard somehow occurs in two levels: the cognitive course of action based on the universal custom and mores and the non-cognitive ethics of God, which is beyond our perception and intelligibility, though it is indeed a higher order ethics. In both senses, it seems the ethical for Kierkegaard has some fragrance of consequentialism: either it is for the consequences of following the norm and the universal or it is teleological suspension of the ethical for a divine telos or goal. However, Kierkegaard's higher ethics is embedded in its relation to the divine and is closest to the existential-spiritual ethics of Axial Age sages.
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